One Thousand and One Conjectures

Copies per text follow preferential attachment: power-law copy counts, with survival size-biased so bestsellers over-survive superlinearly. Falsify: medieval library catalogs vs extant counts.

Manuscripts became binding waste on an institutional obsolescence clock, not a material wear-out clock.

Production mode (visual exemplar copying vs dictation/pecia mass production) is recoverable from error typology alone.

Viking hack-silver should follow the universal power-law mass distribution of brittle fragmentation; deviations mark the arrival of weighed-payment standards. Falsify: fragment masses in Cuerdale and Spillings hoards.

Hoard deposition is antiquity's VIX: deposition rates should lead invasions in narrative sources by months (people bury on rumor), and non-recovery rates should scale with conflict mortality. Falsify: dated hoard databases vs chronicle chronology.

Debasement is tolerated until a critical fineness, then old-coin hoarding jumps discontinuously — and the threshold should be roughly the same in 3rd-century Rome and 14th-century France. Falsify: old/new coin ratios in hoards vs fineness series.

Relic translations should cluster in the five years before major building fundraising — acquisitions as anchor investments. Falsify: translation dates vs cathedral fabric accounts.

Shrine market shares (Thames badge finds) follow Polya-urn path dependence: early leads persist beyond what miracle registers justify. Falsify: badge chronology vs miracle-count records.

As Greenland ivory prices fell against elephant ivory, Norse hunters intensified into riskier, more distant grounds — income-target behavior, not profit maximization. Falsify: the existing ivory isotope sequence against price series; profit-maximizers would have quit, not pushed north.

Provenance distance-decay exponents should scale with value density: Mayen lava millstones should decay steeper than fine pottery by precisely the ratio of transport cost to unit value. Falsify: sourced distribution maps.

English market charters before the 13th-century spacing statute should already show the statutory spacing — law codifying a self-organized equilibrium, not creating one. Falsify: charter geodata pre- and post-statute.

Staff notation cut chant copying errors discontinuously: predict per-neume Levenshtein error drops by half across the Guidonian transition within single traditions. Falsify: aligned chant stemmas.

Within a scriptorium, per-copy error rates are constant enough to date manuscripts by error accumulation, like a decay clock. Falsify: error counts vs colophon-dated families.

Oral-epic formulas are redundancy bits: formula density should rise with local information load (names, numbers, catalogs) within Homeric and South Slavic lines. Falsify: corpus regression.

Baltic amber finds fit an advection–diffusion equation with rivers as channels and a measurable "diffusivity" per era. Falsify: FTIR-sourced find maps.

Daughter houses space themselves by competitive exclusion into a tessellation with a minimum-distance rule, violated only along wool routes. Falsify: foundation geodata.

The fair calendar is a solved traveling-merchant problem: dates minimize total circuit dead-time, and its wartime breakdown measurably rerouted trade to sea. Falsify: calendar optimization plus toll series.

Kontor privileges track member cities' route-control Shapley values and re-rank after route shocks. Falsify: privilege lists vs network model.

Iron Age fort intervisibility graphs are small-world, and abandonment sequences preserve connectivity — graceful degradation. Falsify: DEM viewsheds plus dating.

Piece-form boundaries (elephant becoming bishop) should coincide with documented rule-variant boundaries — objects tracking rules across Eurasia. Falsify: find typology vs textual rules.

Gradient error accumulates as √distance between inspection shafts — surveying as a bounded random walk with resets. Falsify: laser-level surveys of Nîmes and Segovia channels.

Successive Gothic campaigns move monotonically toward the thrust-line optimum — iterative structural learning with a measurable decreasing loss. Falsify: dated buttress geometries under limit analysis.

Cathedral heights escalate against rivals within a diocesan radius by roughly fixed increments until the material frontier (Beauvais's collapse sits exactly there). Falsify: height/date/distance panel.

Pre-theoretic builders converged on a diameter-to-length power law near modern acoustic optima — empirical physics before physics. Falsify: measured medieval pipework.

Viking plank widths and scarf spacing sit at the crack-arrest optimum for oak — naval architecture as fracture mechanics. Falsify: ship-timber metrology plus material testing.

Exchequer tally notch geometry encodes redundancy beyond face value — anti-fraud bits in a split physical token. Falsify: metrology of surviving tallies for non-value-bearing regularities.

Post-1200 church orientation errors should trace the geomagnetic declination curve — dating compass adoption in the building trades and refining archaeomagnetism at once. Falsify: orientation databases vs paleo-declination.

Chart accuracy per route scales as 1/√(voyage traffic) — maps as averaged compass logs. Falsify: cartometric route error vs traffic proxies.

Medieval strip scattering tracks the local yield covariance matrix (recoverable from modern soil data): more scattering where covariance is low across micro-zones, early consolidation where it's high. Falsify: field-system GIS vs soil covariance.

Watermill adoption follows a Bass curve whose innovation coefficient is set by monastic presence — monks as the p-parameter of medieval technology. Falsify: dated mill records by region.

Nave RT60 and repertoire co-evolved: long-reverb churches correlate with slower, more melismatic chant and early organum. Falsify: acoustic measurement of Romanesque/Gothic naves vs local repertoire.

Mark distributions across coursework reconstruct shift schedules: batch sizes should be Poisson and gangs should alternate by course. Falsify: mark spatial statistics at documented cathedrals.

Trace-element signatures in blue stained glass should shift with documented disruptions of Asian trade routes — windows as sensors of Eurasian politics. Falsify: dated glass panels vs route-history chronology.

Joins stream-power hydrology to the fiscal cadastre: the 1086 Domesday survey unwittingly recorded a physics meter, because a mill's render capitalized the hydraulic power of its site; feudal rent should therefore scale with drainage-area-times-slope like an engineering formula.

Joins process-engineering labor accounting to Viking naval history: the binding constraint on Norse sea power was textile throughput, not shipwrights; a large woolen sail embodied more person-hours than the hull it drove, so fleets could grow only as fast as spinning capacity.

Joins the cognitive psychology of recall (the serial-position curve: primacy and recency beat the middle) to the stemmatics of oral law: Icelandic law was recited from memory in fixed thirds over three years, so when it was finally written down, the middle…

The cutting-stock problem of operations research meets codicology: parchment page sizes are not aesthetic free choices but near-optimal cuts of animal skins, so leaf dimensions quantize at dyadic folds of regional skin rectangles, while paper leaves, cut from standard moulds, cluster at…

Vertical-monopoly pricing from industrial organization meets the toll castles of the Holy Roman Empire: a chain of independent tolls on one river overcharges relative to a single owner, so consolidation of adjacent tolls under one prince should cut the combined rate and…

Packet-switched content distribution meets the medieval university book trade: the pecia system chunked exemplars into pieces copied in parallel and reassembled, so stemmatic affiliation should switch at known pecia boundaries — an error signature that continuous-exemplar copying cannot produce.

Common-value auction theory meets Venetian state finance: the incanti — annual auctions of state galley charters — were common-value auctions in which patrician bidders demonstrably learned to shade bids across 150 years, the earliest documented winner's-curse correction.